Landry Fields a key piece of Raptors’ cast of swingmen

Landry Fields a key piece of Toronto Raptors' cast of swingmen

Depending on your point of view, it is a media-created narrative, a franchise reality or a depressing fan obsession: The Toronto Raptors cannot get over Vince Carter.

Such is life with a franchise that has won a single playoff series, 11 playoff games and has never topped 47 wins in any season. (A third of the league had more wins in the 2010-11 season alone.) There is a tendency to get stuck on the good times, even when the good times are inevitably tied to a missed jumper, a trip to a commencement ceremony on the morning of the biggest game in franchise history and something called jumpers’ knee.

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There are reasons the memory of Carter lingers while Chris Bosh, beginning his third season away from Toronto, does not resonate in the same way. The Raptors have been sadly, laughably unable to replace Carter at either of the two swingman positions, with a cavalcade of decent and far-below-decent professionals temporarily filling in. When teams do not win, they make changes. Well, the Raptors have made a lot of changes over their history, with the wing spots more unstable than any other position on the floor.

First Rob Babcock, the man who traded Carter, and, for the last seven years, Bryan Colangelo have tried to bring some stasis to the spots. A variety of methods have been exploited: Babcock drafted Joey Graham, while Colangelo has selected DeMar DeRozan and Terrence Ross. Colangelo also tried raiding Europe (Anthony Parker, Jorge Garbajosa), using mid-level money in free agency (Jason Kapono, Linas Kleiza), trading (Shawn Marion), or, most memorably, making a big splash in free agency (Hedo Turkoglu). The moves have ranged from adequate to complete failures. Certainly, the team has never recovered from trading Carter for cents on the dollar or Babcock passing on selecting Andre Iguodala in the 2004 draft, a move that Sportsnet’s Michael Grange calls the franchise’s original sin.

Colangelo’s latest attempt to overhaul the position features no single wing player who is setting up to be an offensive fulcrum. The question these Raptors will find out is whether a team needs one for success.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Landry Fields, signed away from the New York Knicks in the off-season with a three-year, US$19-million offer in restricted free agency. The Raptors have publicly compared Fields, who struggled last year to adapt to the ever-changing Knicks, to Jorge Garbajosa as a “glue guy” and to Shane Battier as a player whose modest statistics belie his actual contributions.

“It’s good to have great scorers. You don’t need that supreme, over-the-top superstar,” Fields said. “You just need five guys on the floor who trust each other and play well with each other. You look at the Detroit Pistons when they won their championship [in 2004]. OK, they had great players on their team, but nobody who was a superstar … You just need five great guys that play well and want to do the little things in order to win. If you can get five guys like that, you can beat anybody.”

It is just that a superstar wing has been prominently involved with so many championship teams in the last 20 years — Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Manu Ginobili, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James and so forth. James, Wade and Kevin Durant were at the centre of last year’s NBA Finals, with Bryant gunning for all three of them this year.

And, more to the point, the Raptors have kicked the tires on getting a far better scorer at one of the wing spots: They were interested in Iguodala before he was dealt to Denver in the off-season and would still like to add a creator on the wing.

For now, though, they have pieces. DeRozan, who will likely become the first swingman to begin four consecutive seasons as a starter for the Raptors since Carter, is a capable scorer whose game remains unrefined; Kleiza, possibly better as a small-ball power forward than a small forward, can shoot and post up; Ross is a rookie whose shooting stroke and defensive ability provide reason for optimism. And then there is Fields, whose rookie season was as surprisingly good — he was a second-round pick — as his sophomore season was disappointingly bad.

The Raptors have cautiously embraced advanced statistics, and Fields is proof: On the surface, paying that much money for a player whose production dropped off of the table from his first to second year is outrageous. But Toronto sees him as an above-average defender, offensive rebounder and slasher, qualities not always simple to quantify.

“The most educated fans understand [what I do]. A lot of fans just want to see the glitz and glamour of basketball with scoring and high-flying plays. Here and there, I do some of that stuff,” Fields said. “It’s the simple little things that not a lot of people notice. It’s trying to do everything right, which in turn can set up another person. If you talk about a hockey assist, it’s something like that. That doesn’t get counted in basketball, but stuff like that is a good defining point for what they should expect from me.

“It’s kind of the intangibles.”

Since the Raptors passed on Iguodala — choosing Rafael Araujo instead eight years ago — and dealt Carter, they have been chasing their own tail at the wing spots. They have spent money on swingmen, they have traded players to acquire swingmen, they have used draft picks in order to groom young swingmen. Now they are betting that their investment in the little things will pay dividends.

The odds say that something has to pan out for the Raptors on the wing, and soon. They have tried too many different methods to be met with constant failure. When success comes, though, it is going to feel awfully strange. For so long, change has been the constant.

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